Conscious Choice Seattle: Living On

Scott Glascock

HEART OF A MAN

People often ask us at Evergreen Monthly who reads our magazine. The answer is at the heart of what we do.

During his too-short life, the late Scott Glascock resided at the heart of what is meaningful and how to express it here in our Puget Sound community. He was admired by legions, including his close friends at the world-class restaurant Café Flora in Madison Valley.

It is Evergreen Monthly’s privilege to reprint an excerpt from Scott’s self-authored obituary. Scott died May 16 of cancer after many years of serving our region in the most personal and professional ways.

I didn’t know Scott. But I know this: He is exactly the sort of person our readers want to know about.

—Bob Condor, Editor

July 2005 | Back Woods

Living On

Scott Glascock’s parting words are inspiration for our deepest selves

By Scott Glascock

I was born in a remote part of southern Oregon on the North Fork of the Umpqua River on the 16th of December, 1941. But my earliest memories are of Laguna Beach during World War II, living in a rambling old shingled house on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, and waiting with my mother for hour-long military convoys on their way to San Diego or LA. During those years, 1942 to 1945, I developed a strong sense of identity with the Pacific Ocean. But most of my childhood-the years between‘45 and‘58-were spent on a small farm raising peaches, grapes, and livestock in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Those were precious years spent with a wonderful ethnically mixed population of Assyrians, Italians, Armenians, and Portuguese from the Azores, most of whom were small farmers just like us.

While small towns in the valley were innately conservative during the fifties, there were some counterweights. Both of my parents, who were Republicans, taught my sisters and me strong values of social justice. Both parents were outspoken about racism and the unfair treatment of people who were economically marginalized. In addition, our mother in particular, was non-repressive of different forms of human sexuality. During those growing-up years in the valley, I often felt like an outsider. I know that I was appreciated and loved by a great variety of people in the little world that I was growing up in. But I think deep down, I knew that I was a little gay boy, although I wouldn’t have known what that meant. I just knew that I was different. I was a voracious reader, and much of what I read were the classics of English literature. But my mother also exposed me at an early age to the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller whose books were in our house within weeks of the U.S. bans against them being lifted. We did not have television, but I was very attached to a number of radio programs, including what, decades later, I discovered were the programs of the most famous gay icons-Ethel Merman, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, and Tallulah Bankhead. At night, in the privacy of my bedroom upstairs in our big old farmhouse, I would read the great fiction to which I was exposed and listen to the radio. The late-night radio programs would come from places like Boise, Idaho, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. I was able to hear speeches by political and social philosophers who convinced me of t the potential for nuclear annihilation and the need to create more just and equitable societies. These messages helped to turn me away from the conservative, fearful dogma that dominated much of rural life during and following the McCarthy era.

There was a rule in our family that all offspring should go away to a college at least a hundred miles from home. I think that was a good rule; it helped me grow up. I chose the University of Washington and life in Seattle. After four years, and with a degree in Asian studies, I returned to California and the MBA program at Berkeley. Two episodes greatly influenced me during those years,‘63 to‘65. First was the assassination of President Kennedy. I didn’t idolize him, but I felt he was highly intelligent, had some moral authority, and had helped lead the United States away from the Cold War. I was rather dismayed that upon the news of the President’s death, most of my fellow students and the faculty were concerned primarily about the impact on the stock market. In the fall of 1964, the Free Speech Movement broke out on the Berkeley university campus in response to the administration’s attempt to control political speech and activity. Most of this activity was centered on recruiting for the civil rights movement and publicizing the horrors of the Vietnam War there. It was an exciting time for me because, for the first time in my life, I experienced and joined collective efforts to say no to authority.

After finishing my MBA, I went to work in San Francisco for the international division of the Bank of America where I was the area administrator for India, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. It was a fascinating time for me mainly because I saw firsthand how American corporate interests worked to dominate the economies and the economic and social interests of third-world countries. But after work, I would go home to my apartment, take off my blue pin-striped banker’s suit, and dress appropriately for the meetings and activities of the Peace and Freedom Party. The Party was part of a larger effort to develop a third-party alternative to the pro-war doctrines of most in the Democrat and Republican parties. While my years at Bank of America taught me about the dangers of U.S. imperialist actions, my time in the Peace and Freedom Party showed me the dangers of left-wing dogma and paranoia. During these years of living this double life, I met Jane, who I later married. And in the summer of 1968, I left the Bank of America, and returned to Berkeley for a Ph.D. program in Asian Studies and Political Theory. In 1969, the world seemed to be falling apart. The war continued to rage, and there were political, anti-war, and other kinds of demonstrations, a number of which I helped organize. These resulted in confrontations with the National Guard on campus and in the city of Berkeley. Both of the Kennedy brothers were now dead, as was Martin Luther King. The drug scene, which had been intellectually driven as a way of expanding consciousness had been co-opted by the capitalist system and greed. Many people were exposed to more harmful drugs who were not conscious of what they were doing.

It was an intense time for me personally as well. I was in a demanding academic program with a focus on revolutionary change guided by Chalmers Johnson. I was in an encounter group. I was smoking a fair amount of marijuana and doing mushrooms. I was seeing a therapist. And I had recently married, but at the same time was beginning to understand how strongly I was attracted to men as the focus of erotic desire. In the fall of 1969, my wife, Jane, and I left Berkeley to start a new life in Seattle. The Northwest represented calm, quiet peace, and rainy days. The intention was to come here and engage in a healing process, but eventually to move back to the relative craziness of northern California. The years progressed. I continued to experience change, but in a slower, more thoughtful way. Jane I went separate ways early in 1972. It was, for me, an experiment to see if gayness was truly an important part of my life; I very quickly discovered that it was.

Equally important, maybe more so, was my increasing desire to engage in meaningful social change. Over the following years, I had wonderful, sometimes exciting, sometimes scary adventures related to progressive social movements. These included four years at the University of Washington developing a program for students and alumni who wished to explore vocations in social change. After that, I worked for several years for Northwest Social Systems, whose goal it was to help people live more constructive lives. I trained diverse groups, helping people develop their self esteem and build communications and assertiveness skills. During the seventies, I was living in a collective household that was host to the evolution of a group of young men opposing patriarchy. This involved a mix of volunteering for feminist groups to provide child care, reaching out to other men about the negative effects of stereotypical male sex roles, developing men’s discussion or encounter groups, and doing guerilla street theater exposing the nasty effects of typical male upbringing and gender roles. At the time, it began to seem to me that the real evils of the world-homophobic and sexist attitudes, the overwhelmingly competitive approach to life in the U.S., and imperialist political and economic policies-were not so much based on Marxism versus capitalism or on political philosophies, but came from the dominance of our patriarchal culture. I was moving from a Berkeley neo-Marxist view to a broader view that perhaps most of the damage being done to the planet and other humans was due to patriarchal attitudes and male gender dominance.

In the late seventies, I got involved in an affinity group to demonstrate non-violently against Trident submarines coming into the naval base at Bangor across Puget Sound. I also participated in the beginnings of the gay movement, including the anti-13 campaign in 1979. In the early eighties, I felt I needed to take a break, so for the next two years I chose to develop a landscape business. I soon enough discovered that I needed more human interaction and more engagement with efforts toward peace and progress. So I went to work for Metrocenter where I developed a curriculum for high school-age people interested in exploring work related to a sustainable society. When the Reagan era began, funding for this and other programs dried up. So in 1983, I went to work for the Pike Market Clinic whose purpose was to provide primary care to low-income people living in downtown Seattle. During this time, I was increasingly tied into Tibetan Buddhism. Toward the end of the eighties, there was a period when I got involved with ACT UP as I watched my brothers, comrades, and former lovers dying of AIDs. During this time, I also spent a wonderful year as an espresso barista at M. Coy Books. That was followed by a decision to join two old friends in developing and managing a new vegetarian restaurant, Cafe Flora, in Madison Valley. And finally, I shifted to a new enterprise with one of my restaurant partners, a retreat center which supports contemplative spirituality and progressive social change.

The most important part of my life had been my really wonderful family of choice in addition to my family of birth. It gets down to that-that matters most to me. I have been incredibly blessed with amazing lovers, and extraordinary friends, male and female, gay and straight. You know who you are. As I approach leaving this lifetime, in spite of the horrific things that are happening to the environment, the hypocrisy and hubris of U.S. foreign policy, and the destruction of much of the American social support system, I am hopeful that people will succeed in turning the current ugliness around. Thank you.

Remembrances to Group Health Hospice, 1730 Minor, Suite 1500, Seattle, WA 98112 or www.ghcfoundation.org.

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